I walk my dogs twice a day and the cars are constantly driving by with their array of sensors. Made me feel like I was being constantly filmed and recorded... which as I understand them to work I certainly was/am. Outside of that, I resented being involuntarily part of a science experiment that is objectively pretty dangerous all things considered. For example, I would never cross the street when one was coming down the road. I didn't trust them.
> What about the experience of using the service changed your opinion?
The UX is really incredible. The car handled driving very, very well. Much better/safer than most Uber/Lyft's I've been in. Made me realize how freeing this technology will be for those that don't have the ability to drive. If you don't have a car / don't have the ability to drive in Phoenix, you're going to have a bad time. Walkability here is typically very poor.
The reliance on a static world map is a very big safety feature in my opinion. I wouldn't be as confident stepping into the path of a Tesla.
In an ideal world, we'd have physical separation for peds/bikes/skateboards/etc and motorized vehicles, but if we have to share, I'd much rather share with AI than humans.
(That's my pedestrian perspective. As a driver, I love driving and would hate to lose the right. But honestly I think the writing is on the wall, especially in dense urban environments.)
* They are very safe and you’re not at the mercy of the Uber/Lyft driver’s driving skills.
* Their cars are pretty good (Jaguar I-Pace fleet) and generally very clean. You know what you’re getting every time.
* You don’t have to interact with a driver.
* No tipping.
- The interiors are nice, well air conditioned and don't smell
- You don't have to talk to a person, which I don't always hate but have had some bad experiences. This just removes the roll of the dice from the equation entirely.
- They are currently at par or cheaper with Uber/Lyft prices and typically it's faster for the car to arrive
- You get to play your own music
My partner has been propositioned and harassed over a dozen times by Uber drivers.
I think for many this is going to be a killer feature.
Edit: to be totally clear: I did not agree in either situation, but tried to gracefully divert or redirect without escalating the situation. I didn't confront as, frankly, I wasn't sure if the person would have responded violently.
Uber is valuable, but I have kind of accepted the premise that an Uber drive is just a public transit experience with a customized destination. I should expect some potentially weird and possibly unpleasant interactions as part of the process.
I would 100% convert to Waymo only away from Uber just based on those two experiences and dozens if not hundreds of generally positive Uber experiences.
I think Uber has solved this to some degree with their rating system, but it's still a big problem.
So great to hear. Seeing videos of self-driving Tesla made me fear for the worst.
Right. Because Tesla FSD “beta” is not guaranteed, even if you pay for the monthly subscription.
And even if you did have Tesla FSD beta, it’s a pile of shit. It’s gets worse every quarter as they continue to remove safety sensors from vehicles due to supply chain issues.
Have they removed the "you need to be fully aware and ready to grab the wheel" requirements of FSD? If not, how is this comparable? There is no driver.
Tesla is developing a general solution which works everywhere and can take left hand turns! ;)
Ah yes, the classic comparison between a product you can literally go out and use, today, versus some hypothetical Tesla future state. No matter how good the technology is, Tesla promises something better and people act like it exists.
- they’re cheap. $5/ride.
- they’re fun. It’s a self-driving car! That’s cool! I genuinely had fun every time I was taken around in one.
If they scale, that will become a problem:
- people puking in car
- people having sex in car
- people eating greasy fries in car
These happen in public transportation too (the sex one not as often, but puking, eating smelly/gross food definitely), but the big difference here is that users won't be anonymous. The next waymo rider (or waymo staff if the car stops by some inspection checkpoint between rides, or some extra in-car sensors) will be able to report the incident, which would flag repeating bad riders over time.
Overall the experience would be as good as a Uber today, as like you said, no roll of the dice on the driver.
Another new problem specific to self driving and not seen for public transportation: muggers driving a high speed bike targeting isolated rides (they'll know how easy it is to make the car stop, smash a window, and get the rider's valuables). Basically the modern version of stagecoach robberies.
One could argue these already happens in Europe on highways with traffic jams, but I can see the muggers being more active at night, since in addition to knowing the rider can't try to escape, there's also less crowds around. It'll be very dependants on regions : In Phoenix, I'd assume less often as muggers won't know if the rider is carrying.
Just warnings and sirens. Nothing drastic, such as "Your Google account has been terminated for violating Google's terms of service".
Muggers won't be an issue since it's complicated to get people's stuff out of the car through a broken window.
Eh, I've used public transport regularly for 10+ years in two countries as a resident and in many, many cities as a visitor, and I can count on one hand the number of incidents I've had where someone has thrown up/left vomit on the bus or train I was on. The greasy/smelly food thing is slightly true, but let's be real, someone eating a McDonald's on a train for 10 minutes out of a 4 hour journey is partially because there's no other choice for food on that train on a long journey. On short distance transit (within the city/region) I genuinely can't remember the last time I had an issue with someone eating on the bus.
> Another new problem specific to self driving and not seen for public transportation
This is just FUD. If someone stepped out in front of me in a car in my city, I would stop. It's just as likely that two people step in front of me, one smashes my window and grabs my valuables and the other stops me from driving off, as it is that they pinpoint driverless cars.
Given that they are a Google/Alphabet company this seems like a missed opportunity for running ads on loop.
I hate them.
At least in the area I'm in (the Inner Sunset), they often cruise around with no passengers while waiting for a request. While doing so, they circle around idling at 10-15mph, pausing for 30 seconds or more at stop signs. It's long enough where just when you decide they've completely stopped and start to go around, they "wake up" and start moving again. I have personally been held up by four separate Cruise vehicles acting this way within a ten block section of a single trip. It is maddening, and there's no safe or reasonable way to pass them. I am generally quite patient and not particularly affected by road rage, but I'll confess that I have spent significant amounts of time fantasizing about an Office Space printer scene styled destruction of these vehicles.
They need to either find places to pull over (ideal) or drive like normal participants in traffic. Their current behavior feels disruptively slow (cars end up backed up behind them) and simultaneously unpredictable and confusing.
Worse, in other areas like Fell St., they drive exclusively in the left hand lane while driving 15mph below the flow of traffic. This actually causes significantly extra traffic during busier times as that street is often at or near capacity. It also disrupts the design of that road, which has a "green wave" of lights paced at about 30mph. Dramatically fewer cars make it through any section of road when you have one car driving 20mph that prompts everyone behind it to merge over to the right, further impacting the throughput of other lanes.
I've also seen acute instances where they completely fail in situations where humans would cooperate to solve an issue. In one instance, a left-turning Muni bus was unable to complete the turn due to a Cruise vehicle coming from that direction. The Cruise vehicle had entered too far into the intersection before stopping. There's paint on the intersection to indicate that cars need to stop further back, and the Cruise had failed to obey this. The bus was unable to back up due to traffic behind it as well as visibility concerns, and the only real solution was for the Cruise vehicle to move out of the way. There was, however, no way to instruct, plead with, or otherwise convince the Cruise to move. It had no place in particular to be, so it had no reason to decide to do anything other than sit in place with infinite patience and wait for everyone else to resolve the situation on its behalf. I watched as this completely gridlocked a busy intersection for at least five cycles of traffic lights before I got bored and left. I have no idea how they finally unwedged the situation, but I have to imagine it involved the bus driver getting out and having the cars behind clear a space for it to back up and allow the Cruise to complete its prime directive and pass.
Will these things get better? Sure. But right now, they are inexcusably bad drivers.
In one instance, a left-turning Muni bus was unable to complete the turn due to
a Cruise vehicle coming from that direction. The Cruise vehicle had entered too
far into the intersection before stopping. There's paint on the intersection to
indicate that cars need to stop further back, and the Cruise had failed to obey
this.
https://www.firerescue1.com/fire-truck-crash/articles/stop-f...
It’s hard not to envision the nearest construction vehicle casually lifting the thing into the east river while a couple NYPD guys laugh and take pics for their friends.
Staying in the overtaking lane is against the rules in Britain; is that the case in California too?
In Italy this would be resolved by the passengers getting out of the bus, lifting and moving the car out of the way.
I'm mostly excited that they upped the allowed passenger count from 3 to 4. Usually we take a car if we're going out to dinner with friends but the 3 passenger limit made taking one of these a pain in the ass or impossible.
Never seen a self-driving-car in person, but I assume it's the standard 4-seater sedan layout, right?
I was in a Jaguar. The one they show on their site [1].
Having (on average) a single person take up 40 square feet of space on the road for travel is horribly inefficient. You do a few orders of magnitude better with a full train car or bus.
Re traffic: with robot-driven cars, congestion pricing would be technically easy. This is an example of not considering possibilities created by the new tech.
In fact, today the area around elevated freeways is often much cheaper than the surrounding area for several blocks.
People with lower income benefit from having a decent bus system that doesn’t require them to pay $10K a year on a car.
Could you pick a worse example?
Realistically, what breaks efficiencies in the US is city design: Places of work mostly detached from activities and housing, pretty much guaranteeing inefficiency. The robotaxis don't make a difference here: The max number of people looking to travel at once doesn't change, and neither does their destination. This makes the number of vehicles actually on the road not change very much at all: The best you can do is hope for people being comfortable (and not inconvenienced) by carpooling with strangers, not unlike what lyft and uber offer already. In the middle of the day, there's no new demand for robotaxis: They'd be parked somewhere, and every mile they move is a car/mile of congestion they create. So you either park the cars where the jobs are, getting, in practice, the same results as private vehicles, or you park them somewhere else, increasing total congestion. It's not just robotaxis that would park: See what happens in all the train commuter lines in American cities, where most trains just get parked in a yard.
The miracle of cities with top transit (See, for instance, Madrid), is that a relatively high percentage of the network is about equally busy in both directions. Trains might stop in rush hour, but route 6 will be useful in either direction most of the time, with little waste compared to US cities. This is the real weakness of the argument of just adding more transit: What we need to make it work is basically urban rebuilds. IMO still a good idea, bit it's a far slower, and more expensive problem than it might appear.
They make not taking your car with you a bit more feasible, and that’s a start at least.
Think about uses like DoorDash. Instead of (in a city) walking to nearby restaurants, we now replace a larger share of those dinners with ones where cars are driving back and forth across the city to pick up the food and deliver it. This will only become more common when the cost drops by not having to pay a human being, and so we can expect a much greater volume of traffic from this one example use.
Other currently-marginal use cases will see equivalent growth due to the similar economics.
Delivering on this requires some sort of "Uber Pool" like algorithm to put a few people together in a vehicle, but doesn't require large busses.
Average occupancy of a car is 1.5 in the US, and that number shrinks as household size declines.
(It’s also worth noting that there’s no reason that automated technologies wouldn’t also spread to buses and trains. In fact, you can already automate trains. The big win there, is that buses represent massive fleet commonality.)
It depends. For example, you can theoretically fit more people into crowded bike lanes than you can into crowded streets. But around here at least, bike lanes don't get a lot of people. I lived by one for years that I don't think I ever saw a bicycle on once. But even when not in use, all of that space is still being set aside for cyclists.
Where a wide high-quality network is deployed quickly, you do often see high ridership increases, but usually in the US what you see is a bunch of scattered lanes that barely reach anywhere in an unbroken link, and no one wants to ride a journey that is even 5% dangerous.
But for example, London has seen 25% growth since pre-COVID by deploying more lanes widely: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-cycling-covid-...
Also, there was that case with the Uber self-driving car hitting the person crossing the street with a bicycle in Phoenix, because they had turned off the bicycle detection resulting in automatic braking.
Car-like vehicles have massive inefficiencies, because the act of merging into and out of other lanes is inefficient.
A train line can carry up to 80k people per direction per hour. The FHWA’s estimate of a car lane car capacity is 2k people per direction per hour. And because cars have to eventually dump onto a surface network that requires timed cycles so that pedestrians and cyclists can cross the street, these low capacity segments are actually the bottleneck.
However, a bus can carry a hundred people comfortably. Ten buses instead of a thousand cars results in much leas congestion.
They cannot.
> I don’t see how self driving cars would take up significantly more space than mass transit while on the road.
They would take up more space because they're cars. Cars can't get to similar efficiencies of space compared to buses unless you compared packed private cars with sparsely ridden buses. And then of course, there's trains.
Perhaps someday we'll have all self driving cars that can safely coordinate and pack themselves into smaller spaces on the road, but that's decades away at a minimum, since you'd first need to get rid of all manually driven cars.
Only problem I've seen with them is people don't realize that just because you wave them through doesn't mean they will proceed. If a Waymo sees a human on the corner that looks like they will cross it will stop and wait until the heat-death of the universe for them to cross.
There's something adorable and HHGTG about that whole thing! Reminds me of the robotic Star Liner that refused to take off because of the peanuts hadn't been delivered thus its checklist was incomplete. It had waited eons as its passengers withered to corpses securely locked into the cabin only stating that it was 'statistically likely a new civilisation with peanut packages will arise on this planet'.
It might be the only word I use that I have never considered spelling, so I am grateful that you included it your comment.
That said, I think you are wrong and it should be "uey", "uie," "u-ie," or any other spelling that emphasizes the "u" after which the term is named.
Also "I do not know the answer but I am sure you are wrong" is the most internetish comment I've ever made, so that's two striking experiences for me today.
> U-ie n.
> also U, U-ee, U-ey, U-turn, youie
> (orig. Aus.) a U-turn; thus chuck/bang a U-ie, to make a U-turn.
But yeah, u-turn, not you-turn.
As a former Scripps spelling bee contestant, I've developed a low-grade allergy to commonplace onomotopeic words with no obvious, agreed-upon spelling. Recently I struggled with zhuzh (which has the bonus terror of having an alternate spelling, 'zhoosh') - but I commend OP for having chosen a phonetically parseable spelling over one of your (arguably more appropriate) choices, as I suspect it would have taken a lot longer to divine meaning from.
My etymology makes sense. You can even extend it to the "jouergeois" if you need to describe middle-class foodies.
In this case I am definitely wrong and I blame Canada.
I also toyed with just putting "flip a bitch" but figured some might find that problematic as I'm not entirely sure of it's etymology...
I've had humans do this, when I had no intention of crossing the street because I was just standing at the corner waiting to meet somebody. At least the humans give up after a few seconds, with exacerbated expressions like I'm the one who did something wrong. It would be pretty funny to see a robot car sit there for minutes.
In other words, I'm trying to politely set the groundwork to say I think you are wrong if we assume having pedestrians signal clear dis-intent to cross is a reasonable requirement. Of course, the drivers are also wrong to be exasperated with you so I do think in a sense both parties are wrong :D.)
Phoenix is one of the most car-centric places to live in the country. The only reason anyone needs a service like this is because of the area’s complete failure in urban planning.
Car-focused infrastructure is incredibly expensive per capita compared to alternatives that prioritizing walking, cycling, and public transit. It maximizes the amount of public utilities (roads, sewers, etc) needed to serve one family.
One pair of train tracks can serve more human commuters than a 12-lane highway. One bus can replace 30-40 cars, and neither option needs fancy automation to be more cost and carbon efficient than a robotaxi.
Waymo might band-aid the transit situation where you live but it’s doing nothing to address the fundamental problems with large urban areas that require the use of personal vehicles.
If water sources dry up it won't be necessary to raze the city. People will leave anyway.
What scenario did you have in mind where the city runs out of water? I bet the nice folks who actually do this kind of work would love to hear about it. They seem exceedingly confident in their water portfolio [4]. Or maybe you’re just speculating; a little curiosity goes a long way [5].
[1] https://www.phoenix.gov/waterservices/resourcesconservation/...
[2] https://news.wef.org/ancient-engineering-lays-groundwork-for...
[3] https://www.arizonawaterfacts.com/water-your-facts
[4] https://www.phoenix.gov/waterservices/resourcesconservation/...
[5] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environme...
When we talk about razing and rebuilding, it’s notable that this has already happened in our history. That’s how we have interstate highways cutting through urban areas and the destruction of the passenger rail network which was effectively razed and replaced by highways. Many big box stores and parking lots replace buildings that were destroyed (see before and after photos of downtown Houston, for example).
Most American cities outside of the coasts wouldn’t even exist without a railroad network that largely no longer exists.
These are all conscious choices and there’s no such thing as being stuck with cars-only infrastructure forever. The defeatism of saying that we are stuck with cars-only is a lie. After all, interstates regularly need billions of dollars of periodic investment just to keep them functional. Many states continually decide to do things like add lanes and enhanced interchanges at eye-watering costs that aren’t too dissimilar from the cost of adding new rail service.
For example, what if instead of spending $20 Billion in today’s dollars on the big dig in Boston, the elevated highway was simply demolished and the rest of the insane costs that were sunk into an underground highway went into expanding the commuter rail network and making a better rail connection to Logan airport (the blue line already nearly goes there with a short airport bus transfer, which could be further improved). That would reduce traffic in downtown Boston rather than expanding traffic by adding lanes and making driving more attractive than alternatives. This is already one of America’s most walkable cities but the highway was moved underground rather than removed.
$20 billion is so much money that entire new commuter rail lines could have been built for that price.
By the criteria I would use, Phoenix is a massive success in urban planning. The criteria I would use would be the willingness of people to move there.
In 1950, Phoenix was in the top 100 biggest US cities...barely. It was 99th, with a little over 100,000 people. NYC was the largest, with around 8 million.
In 2000, Phoenix was the 6th largest city in the US with 1.3 million people. NYC was the largest, with around 8 million.
In 2022, Phoenix was the 5th largest city in the US with 1.6 million people. NYC was the largest, with around 8.5 million. And NYC has been losing population for the last few years.
The people who moved to Phoenix didn't have guns to their heads. They moved there because out of all the cities in the US, Phoenix worked best for them. To me that points to an incredible urban planning success. They might have failed at building a city that you like. They might have failed at building a city that was hostile to people who want a single family home with a two car garage. But they didn't fail at building a city that people choose to move to.